But she said: “No, it isn’t, not a bit.” And it was in vain that he showed her his best plush suit and the plush suits of his retainers; she simply wouldn’t look at them, nor at the precious stones either; so at last he went off to his Palace to make more rubies and precious stones and things like that, and she went off to cry over the white stone.
Now a lot of tell-tale-tits had built their nests above the Palace, and some of them flew off and told the Magician how Perihelia was always crying in the yew avenue over the white stone. So he said to his slaves: “Get a hand-cart, and carry the thing on to the middle of the bridge and drop it into the river.” So they did, and the stone stuck, end-up, in the mud; and when the golden argosies of the Magician came up the river, bearing peacocks and apes and turquoises, every single galley split on that stone, and the whole treasure went to the bottom; all but the peacocks, and they flew away into the country of a neighbouring King, who thought every one should be useful and not ornamental; so he cut off the peacocks tails, and clipped their wings, and tried to teach them to lay turkey’s eggs. But it is very difficult to get a peacock to do anything useful.
So then the Magician set a lot of people dredging for the lost treasure; and, among other things, they fished up some poor dead apes and the big white stone, and as the stone seemed to have been rather in the way in the bed of the river, they carted it away to the fields behind the town, where the white jonquils grew, and dumped it down there, and left it among the long grass.
And the Princess could not come and cry over it there because she did not know where it was, and besides she was very busy; for, after she had refused to marry him, the Magician said, “Very well, then, you can just do the free washing;” for the royal housekeeper had given five minutes’ notice, and left at the end of it, as soon as the new King had the Palace painted magenta, and no one else knew how to do washing by white magic, and though the people had sneered at it in the White King’s time they stood out for it now, and said free washing was what they had always been accustomed to. Poor Perihelia did not know the white magic; but she washed by the Sunlight Magic, and everything she sent home from the wash was pinky or pearly or greeny, like the little clouds in a May dawn. The people were pleased, but not the Magician.
“I like a colour to be a colour,” he said. “I hate your half measures.”
He was beginning to remodel the kingdom to his own fancy. Instead of a Lord Chief Good-doer he had a Lord Chief Magician, and instead of the Education Department he had a Permanent Committee of Black and Coloured Magic, and he shut up the free washhouses. “Who wants to wash?” said he, and he ordered a free distribution of nasty medicine instead; and altogether he was really beginning to enjoy himself when another tell-tale-tit came fluttering in at the window of his laboratory, and, perching on the top of a crucible, told him of a Rumour. The Rumour had been running about the town like a mad thing, and wherever it ran it left its tail behind it. Rumour, as you know, is a beast with many tales; and now everybody knew that the white stone had moved in the night and had come rolling up to the gate of the town.
“Whatever shall we do?” said the Lord Chief Magician, who was pounding up nasty things in the mortar ready for the free distribution of medicine next day.
“Smash it,” said Negretti. “I’ll take a turn at the medicine while you go and see the thing done.”
So the Lord Chief Magician called together the Permanent Committee of Black and Coloured Magic and sent them to break the stone. And when they began to hit it with their hammers and picks seventeen sharp splinters of white stone flew off, and each splinter hit a member of the Committee in the eye and killed him. There were exactly seventeen members, as it happened. So then the Lord Chief Magician shut the town gates and ran home and hid under the bed.